Clive Sinclair
1975
Sinclair Radionics
Black Watch, the first cheap digital watch ever made, launched in September 1975 at £24.95.
Clive Sinclair’s Black Watch was an unconventional looking digital watch for the time. Digital watches of the time were expensive novelties. The Black Watch, was moulded in black plastic with a five-digit LED display. What was most unusual was that it didn’t have any buttons or consistent display (to conserve power, the display defaulted to being turned off). Described as “a touch and see case” with “no unprofessional buttons”, perhaps it could be considered an early touch technology(?) by touching the two panels below the display, it allowed you to see hours and minutes or minutes and seconds, depending on which you pressed.
While it had the potential of being a successful product, unfortunately the Black Watch was a commercial and technical disaster from the start with a long list of problems:
· The chip could be ruined by static from clothes, carpets, dry air, etc…, the display could freeze on one very bright digit, causing the batteries to overload (and occasionally explode). Today, very few working Black Watches have survived.
· As the quartz timing crystal was highly temperature-sensitive, the watch ran at different speeds in winter and summer.
· The batteries had a life of just ten days.
· The control panels frequently malfunctioned, making it impossible to turn the display on or, alternatively, impossible to turn it off – which again led to exploding batteries.
· The casing was very hard to keep in one piece. It was made from a plastic which turned out to be unglueable, so the parts were designed to clip together, however the clips didn’t work either.
The Black Watch’s catalogue of problems led to a very high percentage being returned, leading to the legend that Sinclair actually had more returned than had been manufactured. The company had to go through the business of sending out tens of thousands of replacements, with no financial benefit whatsoever. Matters were made far worse by the lack of a customer services department – only 20 people were available to repair and return all the faulty watches. The backlog eventually reached such monstrous proportions that it still hadn’t been cleared two years after launch.
Despite the failure of the Black Watch and other products such as the C5 , the company survived with the UK’s Government’s National Economic Board funding, however when it was abolished, Sinclair had no option but to sell it to an arch-rival, Amstrad.
(comments compiled from the web, Deyan Sudjic’s Cult Objects, and personal observations)
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